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A popular southwestern Ohio air show has canceled plans to stage a re-enactment of the
devastating World War II atomic bomb attack on Japan after protests, officials said yesterday.

Dayton Air Show spokeswoman Brenda Kerfoot said the June 22-23 event at Dayton International
Airport will keep a planned
Great Wall of Fire pyrotechnic show but not as an event meant to re-enact the Aug. 6,
1945, bombing of Hiroshima. The B-29 plane “Fifi,” similar to the Enola Gay B-29 bomber used to
attack Japan, will remain in the show but in a separate role.

Air show officials said the re-enactment was meant to highlight a historic event that helped end
the war and save lives that would have been lost if the war had been prolonged.

“We’ve taken it as more of an educational show,” Kerfoot said. “The wording that we used
probably wasn’t the best.”

She said once critics this week began calling it inappropriate for a family event, the air show
decided to separate the B-29 from the pyrotechnic show.

“We didn’t want it to become a distraction to the overall quality of the show,” she said.

The
Dayton Daily News reported earlier that art curator Gabriela Pickett started an online
petition to object to the “glamorization of destruction.”

“I’m very pleased to hear that they are going to have two different events, and not the
re-enacting,” she said yesterday.

She said about 200 people signed her online petition in a little more than a day’s time, and
that she had received a number of emails from Japanese-Americans who were upset. She noted that
Dayton has an immigrant-friendly “Welcome Dayton” initiative and is known for its peace
efforts.

The city has for years highlighted its role as the site of the Dayton peace accords negotiated
for Bosnia in 1995. The Dayton Literary Peace Prize each year honors literature’s power to promote
peace.

As many as 140,000 people were killed in the Hiroshima bombing; more than 70,000 died three days
later in a bombing of Nagasaki.